03/31/2004

There’s always been the real possibility in Iraq that the whole thing will fall apart and that the country will descend into chaos. The United States and the coalition forces have tried within reasonable limits to prevent that from happening, but the underlying problem, the lack of a unifying and overriding national identity among Iraqis as Iraqis, is not something that the United States can resolve by itself.

Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, and others, all have their own views on how a society should be ordered, and it is only natural that they are suspicious of each other’s quest for oneupmanship, which is not merely a survival strategy but also in many cases a matter of moral and theological conviction. The Iraqis may not be able to agree. I wish that they would agree, but I do not blame them for not doing so.

I have no interest in Great Britain participating in a European Constitution. I have no real identity as a European. I have nothing against the French and the Germans but I don’t want them running my country. It is beyond ironic that we Europeans, who cannot agree among ourselves after all these years, would want to insist that the diverse peoples of Iraq find a workable solution to their problems while we simultaneously insist that they may only consider those options that yoke them permanently together under a single governing authority.

The United States may be proferred as an example for Iraq. But the United States only became the United States we know today at the cost of 600,000 lives. Lincoln saved the Union by plunging it into a blood bath. Besides, the United States only learned to appreciate racial, religious and cultural diversity very gradually over four hundred years. Can Iraq do it in four months?

I hope that the United States and its allies are successful in enabling the installation of a unified and democratic government in Iraq, but I don’t think that the United States should be willing to pay any price, in terms of human casualties, in order to see the job through. At some point we have to allow the Iraqis the freedom to foul up, the freedom to pillage and murder and destroy themselves. That is ultimately up to them.

Guernica, 1937

Picasso, Pablo

If everything crumbles in Iraq, if the country literally comes apart, I will not hold George W. Bush or Tony Blair, or their respective administrations responsible. They got rid of Saddam Hussein so that terrorists would not be able to use his government as a resource. That job was worth risking coalition lives for and it was accomplished. But soldiers cannot enforce a kingdom of brotherly love, nor should they be expected to continue such an effort indefinitely at the risk of their own lives.

Most Americans do not yet seem to have awakened to the fact that there are many things that a president cannot do. Being a successful president is largely a matter of fortune as well as skill. A president cannot erase fundamentalist theology from the globe, singlehandedly reinvigorate an economy, make foreign dictators less corrupt, or force other countries to become enthusiastic allies in a battle that they don’t grasp the significance of, and we should be wary of any candidate who does promise to accomplish such improbable dreams. Perhaps it’s the luck factor that prevents any really intelligent people from ever running for president in the first place. Bush removed Saddam. That’s good. What the Iraqis choose to do with the opportunity thus afforded them is a choice that nobody can make for them.

I don’t suggest that the time for the coalition to pull out of Iraq has come yet. But we should start radically decreasing our forces there this Fall if there is not significant progress toward stability and a significant reduction in coalition casualties.

03/30/2004

Thanks to Timothy Sandefur, I’ve just found out that there’s a name for one of the things that I find a continuous irritation in life: the bogus use of probability to demonstrate that a particular occurrence is so unlikely to happen by chance that it must therefore be extremely significant.

A classic example is the fact that there were 911 days between September 11th and the recent bombings in Spain. How significant is that? It seems significant on the surface, but when you take into account the large number of other possible miracle scenarios, it’s not significant at all. The attacks occurred on the 912th day. If they had occurred on 910th or 911th, people would still have made the same connection. That by itself triples the chances of such a coincidence.

But what if the Madrid bombing had been a significant number of days since the invasion of Afghanistan, since the Bali massacre, since the invasion of Iraq, since the capture of Saddam, etc., etc? People would have still found an “amazing” coincidence there, but the chances of such a coincidence occurring are not remote at all when you take into account all of the possible dates that somebody somewhere in the Middle East would deem significant. What if it happened on Bin Laden’s birthday, or Independence Day, or one of the Jewish holy days, etc., etc?

Apparently, there is an axiom called Littlewood’s Law of Miracles that explains such seemingly unlikely coincidences. At first, I wondered if it had anything to do with this Littlewoods, (an ancient and beloved British institution) but that was yet another coincidence.

Here’s an interesting article about a gene called FoxP2. Mutations in this gene cause severe receptive and expressive language deficits in humans. Now scientists have discovered that songbirds have an extremely similar version of the same gene.

According to lead researcher Erich Jarvis, the FoxP2 gene affects the functioning of numerous other genes so that a past evolutionary change in FoxP2 could have had a major influence on human development.

In the future scientists hope to be able to alter the gene in birds in order to study the possible effects of mutations of the gene on subsequent learning.

Countless Londoners have wandered home as drunk as newts over the years singing Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner. The song was already so old and so ubiquitous thirty years ago that I have always assumed that it dated back to the early decades of the 20th century and perhaps even the 19th. So I was quite shocked to read on An Englishman’s Castle that the composer, Hubert Gregg, passed away just yesterday.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner That I love London so Well, maybe it's because I'm a Londoner That I think of her wherever I go

I get a funny feeling inside of me While walking up and down Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner That I love London town

Another Londoner passed away this morning: my grandmother. She was a servant girl in the Upstairs Downstairs era of the 1920s and raised my mother and uncle in Battersea during the blitz. I didn’t see her much over the past two decades because I fell for a well-known scam when I was 18 and ended up getting shipped off to America. Ooops! I’m better now though, but I do miss my home.

03/29/2004

I have decided to celebrate my latest, and probably fleeting, experience with unemployment by awarding myself a real weblog -- one that has permalinks and trackback and the whole nine yards.

As I understand it, I shall even be able to include pictures, like this one:

Long Golden Day

Dalton Brown, Alice

I shall be fiddling with the new site over the next few days, adding more links and basicaly getting to know how Typepad works, so don't be surprised if this place looks entirely different when you next return.